GOPER CALLS FOR SPITZER IMPEACHMENT PROBE
By FREDRIC U. DICKER
EXCLUSIVE
ALBANY — A Republican assemblyman said yesterday that state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer should be impeached if it can be proven he threatened Lower Manhattan Development Corp. Chairman John Whitehead.
Assemblyman Tom Kirwan, a former State Police investigator, raised the drastic possibility of impeachment.
Whitehead last week said Spitzer, a Democrat, threatened him for publicly criticizing the attorney general's probe of Maurice Greenberg, then the CEO of American International Group.
"If what Mr. Whitehead says is true, this sounds like a form of criminal coercion," Kirwan, of Newburgh, said.
Whitehead, a former Goldman Sachs chairman and a Republican, claimed in a Wall Street Journal article that a furious Spitzer tracked him down in Texas last spring to claim, "Mr. Whitehead, it's now a war between us and you've fired the first shot . . . I will be coming after you. You will pay the price."
Kirwan also called on Whitehead to take a lie-detector test to back up his blockbuster charge.
"Right now, it's a 'he says, he says' situation. But if Whitehead passes a lie-detector test, that should be enough to bring charges," Kirwan said.
Spitzer has repeatedly denied Whitehead's allegations through his chief spokesman, Darren Dopp, who insisted again yesterday that while Spitzer and Whitehead had a "spirited conversation, no threats were made."
An extremely rare impeachment proceeding would have to originate with a bill of particulars from the Democratic-controlled Assembly, with a trial by the GOP-controlled Senate.
Calls to Whitehead were not returned.
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